Asimov, Isaac - Robots and Aliens 2 - Renegade.pdf - Isaac Asimov - Planetar81

Isaac Asimov's Robot City, Robots And Aliens Book 2 - Renegade

Books in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots and Aliens™ series

BOOK 1: CHANGELING by Stephen Leigh

BOOK 2: RENEGADE by Cordell Scotten

BOOK 3: INTRUDER by Robert Thurston

BOOK 4: ALLIANCE by Jerry Oltion

BOOK 5: MAVERICK by Bruce Bethke

BOOK 6: HUMANITY by Jerry Oltion

ISAAC ASIMOV’S

ROBOT CITY

ROBOTS

AND ALIENS

Renegade by Cordell Scotten

NOTABLE ROBOTS

BY ISAAC ASIMOV

My robot stories and novels seem to have become classics in their own

right, and, with the advent of the “Robot City” series of novels, to have

become the wider literary universe of other writers as well. Under

those circumstances, it might be useful to go over my robot stories

and describe some of those which I think are particularly significant

and to explain why I think they are.

1. “Robbie”— This is the first robot story I wrote. I turned it out

between May 10 and May 22 of 1939, when I was 19 years old and was

just about to graduate college. I had a little trouble placing it, for John

Campbell rejected it and so did Amazing Stories. However, Fred Pohl

accepted it on March 25, 1940 and it appeared in the September 1940

issue of Super Science Stories, which he edited. Fred Pohl, being Fred

Pohl, changed the title to “Strange Playfellow” but I changed it back

when I included it in my book I, Robot and it has appeared as

“Robbie” in every subsequent incarnation.

Aside from being my first robot story, “Robbie” is significant because

in it George Weston says to his wife in defense of a robot that is

fulfilling the role of nursemaid, “He just can't help being faithful and

loving and kind. He's a machine—made so.” This is the first

indication, in my first story, of what eventually became the “First Law

of Robotics” and of the basic fact that robots were made with built-in

safety rules.

2. “Reason”—”Robbie” would have meant nothing in itself, if I had

written no more robot stories, particularly since it appeared in one of

the minor magazines. However, I wrote a second robot story,

“Reason,” and that one, John Campbell liked. After a bit of revision, it

appeared in the April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and

there it attracted notice. Readers became aware that there was such a

thing as the “positronic robots,” and so did Campbell. That made

everything afterward possible.

3. “Liar!”—In the very next issue of Astounding, that of May 1941, my

third robot story, “Liar!” appeared. The importance of this story was

that it introduced Susan Calvin, who became the central character in

my early robot stories. This story was originally rather clumsily done,

largely because it dealt with the relationship between the sexes at a

time when I had not yet had my first date with a young lady.

Fortunately, I'm a quick learner and it is one story in which I made

significant changes before allowing it to appear in I, Robot.

4. “Runaround”—The next important robot story appeared in the

March 1942 issue of Astounding. It was the first story in which I listed

the Three Laws of Robotics explicitly instead of making them implicit.

In it, I have one character, Gregory Powell, say to another, Michael

Donovan, “Now, look, let's start with the three fundamental Rules of

Robotics—the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot's

positronic brain.” He then recites them.

Later on, I called them the Laws of Robotics, and their importance to

me is three-fold.

a—They guided me in forming my plots and made it possible to write

many short stories, and several novels in addition, based on robots.

In these, I constantly studied the consequences of the Three Laws;

b—It was by all odds my most famous literary invention, quoted in

season and out by others. If all I have written is someday to be

forgotten, the Three Laws of Robotics will surely be the last to go;

c— The passage in “Runaround” quoted above happens to be the very

first time the word “robotics” was used in print in the English

language. I am therefore credited with the invention of the word (and

also “robotic,”

“positronic” and “psychohistory”) by the Oxford English Dictionary,

which takes the trouble—and the space—to quote the Three Laws. (All

these things were created by my 22nd birthday and I seem to have

created nothing since, which gives rise to grievous thoughts within

me.)

5. “Evidence”—This was the one and only story I wrote while I spent 8

months and 26 days in the army. At one point I persuaded a kindly

librarian to let me remain in the locked library over lunch so that I

could work on the story. It is the first story in which I made use of a

humanoid robot. Stephen Byerley, the humanoid robot in question

(though in the story I don't make it absolutely clear whether he is a

robot or not) represents my first approach toward R. Daneel Olivaw,

the humaniform robot who appears in a number of my novels.

“Evidence” appeared in the September 1946 issue of Astounding

Science Fiction.

6. “Little Lost Robot”—My robots tend to be benign entities. In fact, as

the stories progressed they gradually gained in moral and ethical

qualities until they far surpassed human beings and, in the case of

Daneel, approached the god-like. Nevertheless, I had no intention of

limiting myself to robots as saviors. I followed wherever the wild

winds of my imagination led me and I was quite capable of seeing the

uncomfortable sides of the robot phenomena.

It was only a few weeks ago (as I write this) that I received a letter

from a reader that scolded me because, in a robot story of mine that

had just been published, I showed the dangerous side of robots. He

accused me of a failure of nerve.

That he was wrong is shown by “Little Lost Robot,” in which a robot is

the villain, even though it appeared nearly half a century ago. The

seamy side of robots is not the result of a failure in nerve that comes

of my advancing age and decrepitude. It has been a constant concern

of mine all through my career.

7. “The Evitable Conflict”—This was a sequel to “Evidence” and

appeared in the June 1950 issue of Astounding. It was the first story I

wrote that dealt primarily with computers (1 called them “Machines”

in the story) rather than with robots per se. The difference is not a

great one. You might define a robot as a “computerized machine” or

as a “mobile computer.” You might consider a computer as an

“immobile robot.” In any case, I clearly did not distinguish between

the two, and although the Machines, which don't make an actual

physical appearance in the story, are clearly computers, I included

the story, without hesitation, in my robot collection, I, Robot, and

neither the publisher nor the readers objected. To be sure, Stephen

Byerley is in the story but the question of his roboticity plays no role.

8. “Franchise”—This was the first story in which I dealt with

computers as computers, and had no thought in mind of their being

robots. It appeared in the August 1955 issue of If: Worlds of Science

Fiction, and by that time I had grown familiar with the existence of

computers. My computer is “Multivac,” designed as an obviously

larger and more complex version of the actually existing “Univac.” In

this story, and in some others of the period that dealt with Multivac, I

described it as an enormously large machine, missing the chance of

predicting the miniaturization and etherealization of computers.

9. “The Last Question”—My imagination didn't betray me for long,

however. In “The Last Question,” which appeared first in the

November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly, I discussed the

miniaturization and etherealization of computers and followed it

through a trillion years of evolution (of both computer and man) to a

logical conclusion that you will have to read the story to find. It is,

beyond question, my favorite among all the stories I have written in

my career.

10. “The Feeling of Power”—The miniaturization of computers played

a small role as a side issue in this story. It appeared in the February

1958 issue of If, and is also one of my favorites. In this story I dealt

with pocket computers, which were not to make their appearance in

the marketplace until ten to fifteen years after the story appeared.

Moreover, it was one of the stories in which I foresaw accurately a

social implication of technological advance rather than the

technological advance itself.

The story deals with the possible loss of ability to do simple arithmetic

through the perpetual use of computers.I wrote it as a satire that

combined humor with passages of bitter irony, but I wrote more truly

than I knew. These days I have a pocket computer and I begrudge the

time and effort it would take me to subtract 182 from 854. I use the

darned computer. “The Feeling of Power” is one of the most

frequently anthologized of my stories.

In a way, this story shows the negative side of computers, and in this

period I also wrote stories that showed the possible vengeful

reactions of computers or robots that are mistreated. For computers,

there is “Someday,” which appeared in the August 1956 issue of

Infinity Science Fiction, and for robots (in automobile form) see

“Sally,” which appeared in the May-June 1953 issue of Fantastic.

11. “Feminine Intuition”—My robots are almost always masculine,

though not necessarily in an actual sense of gender. After all, I give

them masculine names and refer to them as “he.” At the suggestion of

a female editor, Judy-Lynn del Rey, I wrote “Feminine Intuition,”

which appeared in the October 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy

and Science Fiction. It showed, for one thing, that I could do a

feminine robot, too. She was still metal, but she had a narrower

waistline than my usual robots and had a feminine voice, too. Later

on, in my book Robots and Empire, there was a chapter in which a

humanoid female robot made her appearance. She played a villainous

role, which might surprise those who know of my frequently

displayed admiration of the female half of humanity.

12. “The Bicentennial Man”—This story, which first appeared in 1976

in a paperback anthology of original science fiction, stellar #2, edited

by Judy-Lynn del Rey, was my most thoughtful exposition of the

development of robots. It followed them in an entirely different

direction from that in “The Last Question.” What it dealt with was the

desire of a robot to become a man and the way in which he carried out

that desire, step by step. Again, I carried the plot all the way to its

logical conclusion. I had no intention of writing this story when I

started it. It wrote itself, and turned and twisted in the typewriter. It

ended as the third favorite of mine among all my stories. Ahead of it

come only “The Last Question,” mentioned above, and “The Ugly

Little Boy,” which is not a robot story.

13. The Caves of Steel—Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Horace L.

Gold, editor of Galaxy, I had written a robot novel. I had resisted

doing so at first for I felt that my robot ideas only fit the short story

length. Gold, however, suggested I write a murder mystery dealing

with a robot detective. I followed it partway. My detective was a

thoroughly human Elijah Baley (perhaps the most attractive character

I ever invented, in my opinion) but he had a robot sidekick, R. Daneel

Olivaw. The book, I felt, was the perfect fusion of mystery and science

fiction. It appeared as a three-part serial in the October, November,

and December 1953 issues of Galaxy and Doubleday published it as a

novel in 1954.

What surprised me about the book was the reaction of the readers.

While they approved of Lije Baley, their obvious interest was entirely

with Daneel, whom I had viewed as a mere subsidiary character. The

approval was particularly intense in the case of the women who wrote

to me. (Thirteen years after I had invented Daneel, the television

series Star Trek came out, with Mr. Spock resembling Daneel quite

closely in character—something which did not bother me—and I

noticed that women viewers were particularly interested in him, too. I

won't pretend to analyze this.)

14. The Naked Sun—the popularity of Lije and Daneel led me to write

a sequel, “The Naked Sun,” which appeared as a three-part serial in

the October, November, and December 1956 issues of Astounding and

was published as a novel by Doubleday in 1957. Naturally, the

repetition of the success made a third novel seem the logical thing to

do. I even started writing it in 1958, but things got in the way and,

what with one thing and another, it didn't get written till 1983.

15. The Robots of Dawn—This, the third novel of the Lije Baley/R.

Daneel series, was published by Doubleday in 1983. In it, I introduced

a second robot, R. Giskard Reventlov, and this time I was not

surprised when he turned out to be as popular as Daneel.

16. Robots and Empire—When it was necessary to allow Lije Baley to

die (of old age), I felt I would have no problem in doing a fourth book

in the series provided I allowed Daneel to live. The fourth book,

Robots and Empire, was published by Doubleday in 1985. Lije's death

brought some reaction, but nothing at all compared to the storm of

regretful letters I received when the exigencies of the plot made it

necessary for R. Giskard to die.

So it turns out that my robot stories have been almost as successful as

my Foundation books, and if you want to know the truth (in a

whisper, of course, and please keep this confidential), I like my robot

stories better.

Here, in Renegade, Cordell Scot ten has written an excellent example

of why I like the robot stories. A simple question arising from the

Laws—”What is good for humans?”—is developed into a complex and

intriguing story.

CHAPTER 1

Asimov, Isaac - Robots and Aliens 2 - Renegade.pdf

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